Arm processors are getting more and more popular in the cloud every day. Microsoft is about to offer Arm-based virtual machines on Azure as well and they have announced a preview for it. The preview is accessible on-demand by filing the request form here.
Ampere-powered virtual machines
The new Azure Virtual Machines are powered by Ampere’s Altra Arm processors. Microsoft states that the new virtual servers are engineered for efficiently running scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open-source databases, cloud-native .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and more. Microsoft offers two types of Arm-based virtual servers for now: general-purpose Dpsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5.
The Dpsv5 and Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machines can run their Ampere Altra processors up to 3 GHz clock speeds. The core number can reach up to 64 and deliver 2 GiB, 4 GiB, and 8 GiB memory per vCPU. The network speed can also go up to 40 Gbps. Currently, the virtual machines in preview state support Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, and Windows 11 Professional/Enterprise operating systems. AlmaLinux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Debian, and Flatcar will be supported in the future as well.
Sean McKenna, group product manager of Azure Kubernetes Service at Microsoft said:
« As we continue to see customers adopting AKS as their Cloud Native compute platform, providing the price performance of the Ampere Arm-based processor through a consistent managed Kubernetes API gives them the ability to migrate their workloads to drive further efficiencies as they scale up their cloud footprint »